Storytelling in movies – Hacksaw Ridge and Hell or High Water

Third in my series about what makes a story good enough to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar,.

SPOILER ALERT – In order to discuss what makes these stories work, I’m going to ruin them for anyone who hasn’t seen them. Go see these movies and then come back.

The Movies

Hacksaw Ridge

The synopsis from Metacritic says:

In Okinawa during the bloodiest battle of WWII, Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield) saved 75 men without firing or carrying a gun. He was the only American soldier in WWII to fight on the front lines without a weapon, as he believed that while the war was justified, killing was nevertheless wrong. As an army medic, he single-handedly evacuated the wounded from behind enemy lines, braved fire while tending to soldiers and was wounded by a grenade and hit by snipers. Doss was the first conscientious objector awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

And here’s IMDB:

WWII American Army Medic Desmond T. Doss, who served during the Battle of Okinawa, refuses to kill people, and becomes the first man in American history to receive the Medal of Honor without firing a shot.

I’m seeing a pattern in the synopses on these two websites. IMDB seems to be in it for the long haul, providing a very brief synopsis you’ll be able to look at quickly ten years from now when you’re trying to remember which movie it was that you saw Andrew Garfield in, or when you’re trying to decide whether to watch it when it comes around on tv. Metacritic seems to be using the advertising copy provided by the studio to try to get people to decide to see the movie in the theatre. I could be wrong. In this case, both descriptions are accurate; you just get a bit more detail from Metacritic.

After seeing the movie – SPOILERS FOLLOW

The storytelling questions I came to this movie series with are how the movie establishes character and generates sympathy for the hero, how it orients us to time and place, how the plot and its beats are arranged, whether it follows the Hero’s Journey pattern, how music and cinematography contribute, and how a writer could accomplish the same thing on the page without benefit of sound and pictures.

Hacksaw Ridge was made by Mel Gibson. So it’s not surprising that the battle scenes (basically the last half of the movie) are graphic and bloody, and that the hero’s religious convictions are a major theme and motivator. It’s also a true story. The real Desmond Doss died about ten years ago, and he actually saved even more soldiers than the movie shows.

We meet the hero as a kid of about 10 in rural Virginia. Interestingly, the first scene in the movie is actually the hero’s father, drinking alone in a graveyard and talking to the dead. The first scene with the boy establishes his energy and his bond with his brother, and the next shows the boys fighting as their mother worries and their father drinks hard liquor from a pint bottle and watches. Des almost kills his brother and is horrified by what he’s done, suggesting an early reason for his later pacifism. We don’t see the whole story of why he refuses to touch a rifle until much later, in a flashback to a scene where he threatens his father with a gun, after stopping his father from shooting his mother.

When we first see Des as a young man, he’s in church. In the same sequence, he saves a guy who’s trapped under a car and takes him to the hospital, where a doctor praises his action and where he falls in love at first sight with a pretty nurse. The time-and-place orientation is through clothing, vehicles, and the way the hospital is equipped. Des is sweet, sincere, heroic, and decent; we know this within probably the first 10 or 15 minutes.

The plot moves along pretty quickly, following a hero’s journey story arc. Des lives an ordinary life, albeit punctuated by his father’s brutality that’s explained by his own experiences in World War One, until Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and every young man in town volunteers to serve. His brother signs up first, but Des follows shortly thereafter (we never learn what happened to his brother). Des is off to basic training, where the Army has put him into a rifle company instead of medic training as he says he was promised. Things are bad in basic training because he refuses to touch a gun, and he’s courtmartialed, but his dad pulls strings to get a letter from a general that straightens things out. We next see Des as a medic assigned to that same rifle unit, on its way to take a ridge in Japan. The rest of the movie is horrific battle and aftermath, and Des patiently, heroically, saving one wounded man at a time and lowering them off the ridge to safety.

I can’t say how music contributed to this one – I didn’t notice it at all. I did notice the lack of music in Fences, which was mostly dialogue and silence. I have a feeling that Hacksaw Ridge used music the way most good movies do, to subtly reinforce the emotions drawn out by the action and dialogue. The cinematography here is vivid.

What did I learn? Similar to Moonlight and Lion, the hero in this movie isn’t like most moviegoers, but he has qualities we recognize and admire. His motivations are strange; we understand the perplexity of the other people in the army, but eventually we do understand why he is the way he is. So, patience. Draw the character gradually, and trust the audience to give you time to do it, as long as you’ve given them enough reasons to like the character in the first place.

Hell or High Water

This is the first repeat viewing for me, out of the movies in this Best Picture nominee film series. From here on out, this will be my second time at all the remaining movies.

Once again, Metacritic provides a lot more information in the synopsis than IMDB. So far, though, Moonlight is the only one where I thought the two websites gave me different expectations about the movie.

Metacritic:

Two brothers—Toby (Chris Pine), a straight-living, divorced father trying to make a better life for his son; and Tanner (Ben Foster), a short-tempered ex-con with a loose trigger finger—come together to rob branch after branch of the bank that is foreclosing on their family land. The hold-ups are part of a last-ditch scheme to take back a future that powerful forces beyond their control have stolen from under their feet. Vengeance seems to be theirs until they find themselves in the crosshairs of a relentless, foul-mouthed Texas Ranger (Jeff Bridges) looking for one last triumph on the eve of his retirement. As the brothers plot a final bank heist to complete their plan, a showdown looms at the crossroads where the last honest law man and a pair of brothers with nothing to live for except family collide.

IMDB:

A divorced father and his ex-con older brother resort to a desperate scheme in order to save their family’s ranch in West Texas.

After seeing the movie – SPOILERS FOLLOW

This is a heist movie, so the structure is different from the hero’s journey form, at least as I understand it. It follows two parallel tracks: one for the two brothers, and one for the Texas Rangers who’re trying to catch them. The relationships within each pair, as well as the west Texas landscape, are just as important to the movie as the characters and the action.

Brandon Sanderson talks about three major forces that make a character interesting: competence, likability, and proactivity. Younger brother Toby is high on competence and likability; his older brother Tanner is high on proactivity; ranger Marcus is high on competence and proactivity; his partner Alberto is more likable and seems competent in different ways from Marcus. The movie shows these qualities through actions and interactions, like the scene where Tanner impulsively robs a bank while Toby leaves a $200 tip for a flirty waitress, and the scene where Marcus drags his partner to the small town whose bank branch he’s figured out the pair will rob next.

One challenge for the movie is explaining the bank robberies sympathetically and organically. It does this by dropping bits of information into early scenes so we feel the brothers have a good reason for what they’re doing, and then through a conversation with a lawyer that spells it all out clearly.

The landscape also helps explain what’s going on. The brothers drive on roads with billboards advertising debt relief and going-out-of-business sales, the towns are nearly empty of people, and the scenery outside the towns is vast and desolate. One scene has a group of men on horseback driving cows away from a grass fire that extends as far as we can see in each direction along the horizon. Oil drilling rigs here and there are the only signs of prosperity. Alberto, who’s Native American and Mexican, comments that the land belonged to his ancestors until the army took it away, and now the banks are taking it away from the people who stole it 150 years ago.

What does this movie teach about storytelling?With a parallel structure like this, you need to spend enough time at the beginning of each storyline to let the reader get to know and care about the characters. The movie alternates between the two viewpoints, giving more screen time to the brothers early on and more to the rangers towards the end. Give the reader a chance to breathe: the action in the movie could have been relentless, but it takes breaks for banter between the rangers, a funny scene with a steakhouse waitress, and a playful scene with the two brothers roughhousing against the sunset. You can make your messages blatant, like the main plot about how the bank was ripping off Toby’s mother, or subtle, like what really happens when just about everybody is carrying a gun (people are more likely to get shot, and there’s always someone with a more powerful weapon than everyone else).

Up next: Hidden Figures tomorrow, then Manchester by the Sea on Wednesday, and finally Arrival on Thursday.

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I spent 25 years conducting performance audits of state agencies, looking for ways they could be more effective and efficient. I helped write countless government reports. I worked with the smartest, nicest people in state government, and was honored to be a part of that group. Now, though, I’m writing fiction (yay! adjectives! dialogue!), learning banjo, traveling, hanging out with my fabulous granddaughters, and – big surprise – I’m still not decluttering that back room that was on hold for the past 25 years.